30|03|2015

Antye Greie-Ripatti has created a Tumblr, posting images of women at the controls

Electronic music producer and vocalist Antye Greie-Ripatti aka AGF has started a Tumblr documenting female producers working in their studios.

At time of writing the Female Pressure Tumblr has over 300 entries, inspired by Björk’s January 2015 Pitchfork interview in which she discusses the frustrations of being a woman in the music industry, commenting that the lack of photographic evidence of her working solo in the studio might be one of the reasons why her work is repeatedly miscredited by journalists.

The Tumblr is part of the Female:Pressure network: an international collective of more than 1400 female electronic music producers that aims to challenge the under-representation of women working in the electronic music scene. Talking about the photographs on the Tumblr, Greie-Ripatti says: “I am sick of a bunch of things… the visual representation of women and this ‘one woman in the club’ thing... Here we offer a visual catalogue of female producers, DJs, media artists and electronic music performers at work. These are not our press photos. This is a collective effort to demonstrate women and their use of technology in music and media production.”

Holly Herndon is one out of very few women who's had the priviledge to be on the cover of The Wire. I'm curious to know how many women has ever been on your cover!? If you made a pie chart, how would it look ?

Holly Herndon is one out of many women in electronic music. Talent is just one factor, often subjective to the listener; To be seen and heard you need other factors like networking skills, contacts and perhaps most importantly: someone who's taking you seriously, which women in technology have to work so much harder for. Proving herself in a genre and field that mainly promotes men and operates from a man's perspective, leaves very little room for women and thus female role models.

Instead of the media repeating over and over that one woman who got accepted, how about reaching out to discover more women like her or different from her!? Otherwise we keep hearing these stories of labels and festivals who reject women with the reason "we already have a woman releasing this quarter" or "we already have a woman playing on that stage". Don't stop at "we just had a woman on our cover" get more!